Maybe! Well, this is the million $ question; isn’t it? My friend, Debbie Weil, who has written one of the two definitive books on Corporate blogging (the other being Shel and Scoble’s Naked Conversations) referred an opportunity to be interviewed on CEO blogging to Edelman and then Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion.

The Place: Canadian News Network – BNN! (Shouldn’t it be CNN?)The Interview: On Squeezeplay, a program on money, power and politicsThe Topic: CEO Blogging! (Not again)

The Question: Should CEOs blog?Steve’s Answer: Not really.

My take: I agree with Steve. It’s a “No”, given the monumental task that every CEO has to steer his/her organization. I think this is just the wrong question. The right question is: what are the right qualities for a blogger?

Let’s ask a few more smart people

Dave Taylor argues that Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz shouldn’t blog. Why? He’s got a big job to turn around Sun–too much work to spend time composing posts, battling trolls, and making sure that the blog conforms to the onerous disclosure regulations of a publicly traded company. [Source: Business Week]

Godin defines the essential attributes of blogging and asks if CEOs can afford to do that?

Here’s the problem. Blogs work when they are based on: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness and Controversy (maybe Utility if you want six). Does this sound like a CEO to you? [Source: Seth Godin]

I think that settles this question. However, Godin’s questions now lead me to another question on Company blogging. Should all companies blog? As more and more of us realize (check out Jeremiah’s Death of a Corporate Website post), corporate websites will have to morph into more easily accessible buckets of content. Want to know how the future of corporate websites will be like? I think 2/3rds of Godin’s attributes will suffice to describe the future of corporate websites.

Candor, Timeliness, Pithiness, Utility (Urgency and Controversy)

I’d like to think a company blog is a great way to achieve that. I’m working currently on defining the contours of LinkedIn’s corporate blog and as we make updates, you’ll get to read about the rationale for those decisions right here on this blog. So stay tuned. Subscribe to Marketing Nirvana’s RSS feed.

Check out my other posts on corporate blogging and CEO Blogging, which you may find interesting:

I think personality plays an important role in somebody taking up blogging.

And, I’d rather read a company blog (I’m not saying this because I run one for LinkedIn), but because that’s the role of marketing and evangelism as opposed to the person tasked with steering the organization!

I hope you continue with this ranking, it is very interesting
but I feel it is also very difficult to rank CEOs especially if they blog on their own domain versus a corporate one, large versus smaller firm, etc.

[…] linkedin, sunceo, twitter trackback How about ubiquity of CEO blogging? I don’t think so. I have said this before and I don’t mind repeating myself. I don’t see the era of CEO blogging happening, but […]

[…] I personally think every individual can blog well when it comes to a topic of their interest and passion – product managers can describe their products superbly well while engineers have their own tech needs. Part of my role at LinkedIn is finding out what those special niche interests are and getting them to blog fluently on those topics. Having said that, I do argue whether executives should blog regularly. Methinks there are far more important issues to deal with. […]

[…] to gain trust, something that would be pretty hard to do if they did not have at least four of the six traits above. Most people have the preconceived notion that a corporate blog is nothing more than a well […]